Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto
Loran was a city unlike any I had ever seen, a seemingly deracinated existence considering its starkness against the surrounding desert, the red towers soared higher than any building had a right to. At first I had thought they had an extensive electrical grid connecting the town, the wires spread seemingly haphazardly from building to building, but I quickly realised it was not electricity that the wires were carrying but chakra, I could sense it thrumming through the city from some source, I assumed the leyline, below.
On arrival we spent some time observing the city and it didn't take us long to see something very strange was happening. The streets were filled with puppets, a facsimile of a crowd thronged the alleys and sidewalks and through the streets a parade marched, All completely devoid of life. A sidelong glance at the rest of the team confirmed they had noticed as well and were equally puzzled.
"Someone has to be controlling those puppets," Minato said turning to Shibi, "Can your bugs track where?"
Shibi nodded though told us with the amount of chakra around it may take a while.
By the end of the day we had ascertained there were a people that occupied this city. Most lived a life that contrasted sharply with the presentation of Loran. The gilded towers would have you think that the populus were rich, but all stood empty. The true denizens of this city lived beneath the city proper in privation within ramshackle buildings that were not too far a stretch from mere slums. The people we managed to speak to that we had first imagined might be suppliant were instead tight lipped, eager to be about their business, whatever it might be, and unwilling to speak to unknown shinobi. Some cursed their queen though a great many also hailed her as the one that would eventually avail them of their destitution. The local information was conflicted, we gathered what we could from what we saw and little more from what they allowed us to hear.
In the main this gave us the location of a factory. We saw people enter, some taken by sentinel puppets that wandered the city. We saw none leave though. Bugs sent by Shibi confirmed that the factory was producing the sentinels we had seen and that they were well armed, weapons were apparently hidden in every conceivable nook. Minato also performed his own reconnaissance and discovered a larger series of tunnels beneath the city; he returned a few hours later looking distracted and not a little bemused.
We saw the queen give an address later in the day. From our perch we could only make out the outline of what she was saying. She seemed unaware she was making the speech to a city of automatons. We eventually surmised then that she could not be behind whatever was happening with the city, at the very best she was a bit part in a larger plot. Whilst I agreed I did not believe that the source of this mischief could be far from the head of the city state, too much work stood afoot to have been perpetrated by some no-name denizen. We decided to keep our mission a secret from the queen though Minato's original suggestion of keeping her shielded from any fallout if possible remained in place.
That evening Minato sent Kakashi to begin infiltrating the factory, armed with a healthy dose of exploding tags set with a switch he would keep. Shibi, Minato and myself would continue to observe the city ostensibly to keep an eye out for any other weapons factories but though Minato and Shibi didn't voice it we all knew there was something more to this than just a weapons factory, everything about this city just seemed wrong. And then there were the tunnels I could still see were occupying a part of Minato's attention.
"There's someone we need to look into," Minato finally said, "In the tunnels I found vast networks of fuinjutsu, it's purpose isn't one hundred percent clear to me yet but I found some evidence that someone had been down there making a study of them, the tracks were pretty easy to follow back and they led back to the queen's tower."
"Perhaps someone close to the Queen then?" Shibi said.
Minato nodded, "I want you to send in your bugs and make an initial evaluation of the security of the tower, tonight we'll sneak in and find out what we can."
I looked up at the tower, its final floors still emblazoned in the last embers of the setting sun. It's a good thing I'd never had a fear of heights.
"I hate desert nights." I said, rubbing my hands together as tendrils of my exhaled breath wreathed their way around the outside of my mask, "How can somewhere so warm, get so cold."
Minato merely turned his head slightly as if to say 'what did you expect' and true, we were also fairly high up and the wind was adding to the bite as it rolled in unaccosted from the desert. I still felt justified in complaining though. It was cold, and we had been on this ledge, elevated over the city for over an hour waiting for Shibi's bugs to pronounce their verdict.
I turned to Shibi, "Any luck yet?"
Shibi didn't respond for a few seconds and I was going to check if he was still awake - he hadn't moved since we posted ourselves up here however - "Some luck at least, I think I have found his office, and this high up there don't appear to be any guards, mechanical or otherwise."
Minato nodded in acknowledgement, "We stay for no more than an hour, I'd rather not alert anyone to our presence if we can avoid it. We'll follow you Shibi."
With Shibi's information sneaking in was barely an inconvenience, what we found was beyond what any of us expected though.
Anrokuzan's office was unguarded, obviously not expecting any intruders to enter so high up the tower. The inside was quite neat, the door was locked but shibi's bugs had made short work of it in time for our arrival, what followed was a furtive half hour of reading, shocking discoveries and terrible portents for our mission. We made sure to replace everything back where we found it and shibi's bugs pushed the pins and rolled the lock back into place as the door closed behind us leaving us with plenty of time to make ourselves scarce. We retreated back to safety to discuss what we had found.
"The Queen's advisor is from the future?" I asked for what seemed like the 10th time.
"It seems so, we had information that this Anrokuzan appeared out of nowhere 6 years ago and set himself up pretty quickly with the higher ups in the city. He was our main suspect regarding these weapon factories but coming from the future certainly comes out of left field." Minato said.
On top of the information regarding time travel, which I still wasn't sure if I believed, we found out more information about the network spread throughout the city. Following that it wasn't hard to imagine what Anrokuzan's true intentions were, with the power provided by the ley line it was impossible to gauge how large his puppet army could become. Certainly far beyond anything the Elemental Nations could deal with. The information discovered also almost certainly cleared the queen of any suspicion as Anrokuzan killed her Mother.
"You said his real name is Mukade? What would stop us from finding him, wherever his current self is, and stopping him from ever coming back to do this? There might be more information on what he spent his time doing in his past." Or our present, I continued silently to myself, It didn't seem like language has been adequately prepared for the subtleties of this situation. I keep second guessing what tense to use.
"We don't know enough about this to second guess our course, we can't be sure that ridding his past self prevents him from arriving here, what if our interference is what leads him to travel back in time, what if he's just crazy and everything he wrote is just an elaborate ruse? We don't know enough. We stick to the original mission." He said the last with a nod, seemingly to himself.
I absorbed his words before conceding he had a point, it seemed like the more I thought about it the more my head hurt.
"At any rate, let's rest for now. We'll decide on our next course of action when Kakashi returns." Minato finally said at length. Though he sounded as chipper as always I felt as though there was a frown lingering behind his mask. "Kou you take first watch."
The night passed without disturbance and Kakashi returned before first light. Unfortunately the factory was just too large so the primed explosives would not totally destroy the manufacturing of the weapons. He did however manage to place the explosives strategically so that they would inflict the most damage not only to the factory but also to the infrastructure leading from it, the lines I had at first thought were electrical wires when we arrived should be completely cut off.
We sat and ate our ration bars for a quick breakfast as Minato explained to Kakashi what we discovered. Kakashi seemed to accept it in stride.
"Judging by what I saw in that factory, this guy coming from the future seems like one of the only possible explanations. I saw technology down there I have seen nowhere else." Kakashi explained.
Minato stood up from his seat, "Well now that we have rigged it to blow we shouldn't have to worry about it too much longer, we have a few more loose ends to tie up with the Queen and the information left in his office which part of me thinks we should just burn to avoid learning anything inconvenient but -", he didn't get any further as there was an explosion that rang out against the city, we all turned to Kakashi who held up his hands.
"I primed the explosives to be ready; they shouldn't actually explode without activating the trigger, whatever this is is something else."
We all immediately jumped to the nearest rooftops and then to a vantage point in the city above the slums to see what was happening, happily it looked like Kakashi was right, the explosion occurred in another part of the city. We stared out as hundreds of the automatons rose from the smoke in the distance like bees from a hive wondering to ourselves what could have caused this chaos.
We all saw the problem at the same time, a blonde haired teenager, his hair sticking out at wild angles was jumping through the city, between towers a glint from his forehead gave the clue that he was a shinobi, we all tensed at that knowledge. A few moments later though we saw at a distance that this was a konoha shinobi.
"Who is that?" I asked, I had to assume it was someone in the village I had yet to meet.
"What are they doing here?" Kakashi said, "Wasn't this mission supposed to just a few of us to avoid raising suspicion?"
"I think I have the answer to your questions. I hope I'm not right though or this is really going to get troublesome." I think I heard Minato swear under his breath before he told us to wait behind and leaped away with his characteristic speed.
"What do you think he meant by that?" I asked.
Shibi and Kakashi shrugged.
We didn't have to wait long though, as the teenager unerringly seemed to head in our direction before being smashed through the street into the slums near where we had climbed up to get a view of the city, we dropped down from our perch at a signal from Minato who reappeared momentarily before following them down into the hole.
Well well well, bet this was a surprise. I'm not dead yet, honestly I got well not long after the last chapter but then wanted to focus a little bit on my health and then the pandemic happened and we all know how fun that was. Anyway excuses aside, coming back after all this time it was actually pretty hard to write, even at my terrible earlier ability, it's part of the reason why this chapter is so short. so I'm considering maybe doing another story alongside this, just to get the fingers flowing again. So that might be coming. This chapter was also pretty hard because outside of one or two ideas I have It's pretty hard to write something compelling for our protagonist when this section of the story already orients itself so much around another person. I'm sure I'll figure out a way. I can't promise my updates will be as frequent as before, I can't even promise you won't see another break as long as the last (though I bloody hope not). I hope you enjoyed this chapter and I'll see you in the next one.